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Shawn Purtell at ROI Revolution has a great thread on combining google analytics and google website optimization.  This is a really important step as we don’t consider hte website optimizer to be powerful enough for most people on it’s own.  Additionally, he updated his tip in June by showing how you can read the data within the new google analytics interface. It’s great that Shawn is keeping this thread current - but I’ve got one minor point of clarification. I don’t think the integration is exactly the same.  Using the new analytics I would highly recommend people not exclude their “combination” URL parameter using the exclude list within the google analytics campaign setup.  Otherwise the different combinations won’t appear in the reports.One good option now is to leave it as a visible parameter, which is totally reasonable.  The down side is that you’ll be splitting all of your traffic to your pages over these various combinations so historical comparisons will be harder.

The other option is to store the parameter as a “user defined variable” within the google analytics results.  Unfortunately, you only get one.  Shawn has cautioned, appropriately, that he likes to us his user defined variable for other things - so be sure you don’t need it if you use this option.

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